Cracking Through Kraków - Poland

After a difficult day at Auschwitz concentration camp, we decided to take some much needed time in the beautiful, old town of Kraków. 

Kraków started as a Stone Age settlement on Wawel Hill.  During the 15th and 16th centuries, Kraków had its Golden Age with many buildings and works of art created during this time.

Here is my teeny-tiny family (I zoomed out to show the scale of this thing) in front of the Kraków Barbican. What's a barbican? A barbican is a fortified outpost connected to the city walls. This one was built in 1498 and is one of only three left in Europe. This one is the best preserved. Obviously.

It even has a moat. It is pretty impressive. Obviously.

The old town of Kraków is still surrounded by intact city walls. I love old town city walls. Sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes they let you know that "everything you need to see is right in here, contained by these walls." Makes it kind of nice when you are traipsing around Europe on foot with four children and a dog.

The beautiful old town section of Kraków.

Somehow, every trip we go on through out Europe, includes a visit to McDonald's. Maybe it's because every time we see one we get begged for a hamburger and fries by the kids. 

This is St. Mary's Basilica, built in the 1300's. It is a Roman Catholic church, which brings me to an interesting point. Poland is the most Catholic, and most ethnically homogenous country within Europe. On the day we were in Kraków, the streets were bustling with Roman Catholic clergy walking the streets. Priests, nuns, and monks in robes with rosary beads clicking at their sides.

The Saints Peter and Paul Church in the old town. It is the first building built in the Baroque style in Poland. 

One of the things I love about exploring these old cities of Europe, is that you never know what you are going to get. Little treasures hide around every corner. Like this gate to a small courtyard beyond. Look closely at that top step. Look how worn down it is. How many people have stepped there and crossed through? What were their stories? I, too, stepped through the gate and added my story to theirs.

Like any self-respecting, old city in Europe, Kraków's skyline is dominated by a castle on a hill. Here is Wawel Castle.

Wawel Castle is a sprawling complex of buildings built around a center square on the Vistula River. It was built over different periods in the mid-1300's and 1400's. For centuries it housed the ruling kings of Poland. Now it is a museum. Sorry kings.

Here is a view of the steepled skyline of Kraków from Wawel Hill. Just beautiful.

By now our McDonald's fix was wearing off, when what should we happen upon when we turned a corner? A little outdoor celebration with booths of food. 

Here is our plate of pierogi. Pierogi are Polish dough dumplings stuffed with meat, or onions, or cheese, or all three, then boiled and then fried. They are pretty tasty. The locals running this festival welcomed us in and cleared a spot for us to sit down and eat. (And of course what is any European meal without sausage, as seen in the background of this picture.)

We enjoyed our Polish lunch of pierogi, sausage, kebabs, and vegetables, and we went on our way exploring more of Kraków with our bellies and hearts full.

Here is a section of the Main Square of Kraków. It is the largest medieval town square in Europe.

This is the Town Hall Tower. It was built in the 1200's and its cellars used to hold a medieval torture chamber. Spooky.

This building framed by the amazing blue sky is the old Cloth Hall. Built in the 1400's, it was center for trade and barter for goods like silk and spices from all over Europe and Asia. 

We spent two wonderful days in Poland. One day at Auschwitz reflecting on the atrocities of history, and another day in Kraków, celebrating the beauty that can survive centuries of war and occupation. 

We finished up our day in Kraków with a walk through a park in the old part of town. It was good day.

Do widzenia,

Kelly

Auschwitz I Concentration Camp - Poland

Back in November we took a trip to southern Poland. My daughter, Ashlenne, read The Diary of Anne Frank last year and was interested in visiting the Auschwitz concentration camp, where Anne Frank was imprisoned for September and October in 1944. Anne Frank was transferred to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany in late October, 1944. She succumbed to months of starvation and disease in March, 1945.

Here is the entrance to the camp with the Nazi slogan Arbeit Macht Frei, or Work Makes (you) Free.

Auschwitz took in prisoners from 1940 until late 1944. Because records were lost and destroyed and evidence (human bodies and ashes) of the extermination carried out by the Nazis was hidden and also destroyed, it is difficult to know exactly how many people were murdered in Auschwitz. But estimates put the number at at least 1,100,000 people. Many of the young and very old were never registered when they reached the camp. They were immediately killed in the gas chamber. 

Walking down this gravel street in the rain, it seemed that we were in a quaint, brick village. It was peaceful and serene. It wasn't until you got up close to the buildings and read the description on the placards about the atrocities that took place inside that you realized the horror of this seemingly quaint village. Experiments, starvation, and torture.

This is a pole where people were hung backwards by their arms.

Down the road there is Auschwitz II-Birkenau. The concentration camp that is famous for the railroad lines that lead up through the gates for the easy unloading of people, many of who were sent directly into what were called "showers," but were actually gas chambers where pellets of the pesticide Zyklon B were dropped through holes in the roof. It took 20 minutes sometimes for the poison to kill everyone inside.

Here is a wall where prisoners were shot and killed by guards. Other guards were positioned nearby to remove the bodies and line up a new batch of prisoners to be executed.

This is a window of a basement room in the infamous Block 11 where some of the worst and the most heinous punishments were carried out.

Here are some of the barracks where prisoners of the concentration camp were housed. These are wooden bunks, stacked three high, where prisoners slept two to a bunk on the bare wood. Prisoners that were issued wooden bunks were the lucky ones, though. We passed rooms that were nothing but a cold concrete floor where people were made to sleep.

As the Soviet Red Army advanced towards Auschwitz in January 1945, SS officers ordered the destruction of the crematoriums to hide their crimes. Here are some of them still intact. The Soviet Red Army liberated the camp on January 27, 1945.

Inside the crematorium, the walls, the ceiling, and the brick ovens are coated with soot leftover from the bodies that were burned here.

I walked around Auschwitz with my children and husband. We were all quiet. The acts that took place here, the suffering, it was just horrible. It's almost too much to comprehend. What do I mean almost. It IS too much. A numbness settles on you after you have seen picture after picture. After you have read story after story detailing the awful ways humans can cause pain in another human. When I say numb, I don't mean that you don't feel anything. You definitely do. But you don't see many people crying. What you see is people walking around with a shocked look on their face. Mouths slightly hanging open. And it's quiet. Although I managed to photograph around the tourists on this day, it was quite crowded. But everywhere you looked, people would be standing in line, whispering to their group. This is not the place for running and shouting.

On of the things that helped the Allied Forces determine the number of casualties in the concentration camps were the number of household goods left over that the Jews, gypsies, and political prisoners had brought with them to the camps. We saw rooms like this one filled with suitcases. There were rooms filled with coats, eyeglasses, artificial limbs and leg braces, and hats. But the hardest one was the room filled with shoes. Piles and piles and piles of shoes, numbering in 10,000's. Men's shoes, women's shoes. And the worst, children's shoes. Little white ones turned yellow and grey with age. What happened to those small children that wore them... 

As awful as it is to visit this place, there are small reminders that hope lives on. Like these lanterns placed around the camp as remembrances to the victims.

This is a difficult spot to visit on vacation. Auschwitz isn't exciting, or beautiful, or filled with different regional food specialties. But everyone should try to make a stop at a concentration camp if they are in this part of the world.

Because after all...